Developer: Nuggets Entertainment
Platform: PC (Reviewed)
Genre: Action, Adventure
Publisher: Nuggets Entertainment
RV There Yet? is a game where you are forced to take a dangerous journey with your RV and friends. The goal is to get your battered/beaten-up van home by finding the exit (Route 65), while having to survive different terrains, wildfires, and vehicle breakdowns. RV There Yet? is developed and published by Nuggets Entertainment.
RV There Yet? is another one of those games where you hop on with friends, play for a few hours, forget about the game for a bit and then come back to it. Usually within the genre of ‘friend slop’, but I would say this game was so much more amusing than I would have thought. Think about PEAK, except you need to drive an RV up ridiculous hills, mountains and paths without completely wrecking it.
The premise of the game is relatively simple: you and your friends have to drive an RV back home. You are equipped with several tools in your RV that will help you along your journey. For instance, this includes a winch, patties, cigarettes, fuel, grills and everything that would be needed for a treacherous ride. What I found to be the most interesting aspect of this game would have to be repairing and navigating your RV.
The art and style of this game is so cute and warm-hearted, with the simple grown-upish style turned into cute cartoons. The game has a whimsical art style that creates a hot and hilly environment. The style has emphasised its exaggerated characters, which are chubby dads driving an RV, with their subtle realism of cigarettes and beers. The game leans for a comedic chaos, and the art direction supports the game’s tone and idea creating a fun and ready to jump into a disaster game. The animations in-game are also extremely detailed, from using the welding machine to screwing loose screws on the tyres.
The controls are straightforward, with its little quirks. First and foremost, the RV will always have someone on the driver’s seat, and the manual is like your tutorial on how to familiarise yourself with mechanics and controls, all of which are simple. Besides just the driver, we always found ourselves outside of the RV trying to winch down the RV, give it a good ol’ push or look for items to better help the journey. The winch was a bit buggy, being able to wrap around trees and be stuck on other people, but not the trees themselves.
You are provided with a map, and I do like how the map outlines which way you are going and have gone (highlighted red path), though the map is vague. This is why it’s always better to have people as scouts to check the path. What makes RV there yet? So interestingly funny is that you will encounter all sorts of ridiculous paths and obstacles that require you to put some thought in. However, even after putting some thought into how you will get the RV across a broken bridge, or up a hole will always end up in absolute shambles.
The game is worth the laugh, and is 100% clip worthy as you will get all sorts of ridiculous shots of your friends driving an RV upside down, to you falling to your death from walking a bridge. Though I will say that at the time we were playing this game, there were too many bugs, especially when interacting with the RV. For instance, we would randomly get phased out of the RV if it sped up a little too fast, and the winch would get stuck in random places and completely phase out. There were several occurrences in our gameplay where the items would just disappear, or the characters would bug into one another.
After having said that, we played a few days after and were happy to see that the developers rolled out patch updates to fix bugs; however, the winch was still very buggy. I do wish that there were some in-game achievements that would help us try to achieve full completion and have a goal to reach, adding another layer to the game.
One of the other players, Vroggo, had the following to say about the game: “I like the idea of a chill and funny road trip type of simulator with some obstacles to solve on the way, but the game could use some improvement. For example, a recurring glitch happens where items keep clipping out of the van while it’s moving, and I almost mistook the snake for a stick if I didn’t hear the hissing sound.
Apart from that, the gameplay revolves around driving, navigating, repairing the RV, and some teamwork to solve the obstacles along the way. Although I did wish that there was more life to the environment, since a part of the appeal of the game is in its ambient surroundings as you and your team are driving. Like some more passive animal and bug interactions as you drive, or a night and day cycle where you see fireflies and see the stars at night.”
The music and sounds in the game are comedic and further enhance the game. The engine revving sounds, the crashes, and the wildlife growls all further help with the laughter in the game. The ambient sounds of the janky RV add to the broken roadlife mood. The proximity chat can be hilarious when being chased by bears or winching the RV, adding to the atmosphere.
The game itself is quite fun as it adds several elements of gameplay together. You can cook burgers to heal yourself, you can get attacked by stick-looking snakes, you can collect items from houses, you can use scrap to fix your RV, and you can use bear spray to repel a bear. There are so many things to do, and I love that the map includes new and difficult obstacles for players to encounter. You have an infinite amount of cigarettes, so stamina is never an issue, even if you are being chased by a bear. I especially enjoyed the fact that the game introduces checkpoints so that players do not need to restart all the way from the beginning, which can be quite frustrating for some.
This game is definitely refreshing in comparison to the other titles within this genre. You get to enjoy the scenery as you drive across the mountaintops. This game induces yelling, laughter, and stress, which is a perfect mix for a game to enjoy with your friends.
Overall: 8/10
This is S & S. We are world game explorers. We play games. We have played over 10,000+ games! We travel, we write reviews AND we play more games!!!!
